52 Glamour Cards: A new form of an old power game by Stefan Szczelkun ( in AntiClockWise 1990)

Glamour is a TURN ON. . . 
Glamour is attractiveness incarnate. 
Glamour is the universal focus of desire. 
GLAMOUR IS HIGH TECH FASCISM.

collage by S.Szczelkun

* “HMMMM you are looking glamorous tonight.” The associations are all positive and yet when we look past the glitz at what it is that glamour promotes, we see an ideology of elitism personified.

* The class system that dominates and is throttling the world requires a method to persuade us all to accept the scarcity of POWER AND BEAUTY, and that this is the natural order of things.

* Democratic ideals of equality require that everyone should have a say. A dangerous idea that requires constant obfuscation. Glamour is distributed by chance amongst the population. Every family stands a chance… 

* These standards of glamour permeate the population with ever finer hierarchies of good looks. Because of its apparent natural basis we all accept a position of relative superiority/ inferiority within this graded system. This order is constantly reinforced in the media. 

* We accept the status given to us by our looks and at the same time we are taking on board the principle that a few people are SUPERIOR whilst most of us are (naturally) INFERIOR.

* Glamour conditions us to accept the basic premise in which all class oppression is rooted.

* However we know that there is no rational basis for the valuing of one persons appearance ABOVE any other. That inherently everyone is COMPLETELY attractive and desirable. The fact that this rationally self-evident concept is ‘inconceivable’ to most of us is a measure of how profoundly we have all been hurt by classism.

* Where did glamour come from ? 

* The myth of the hero is ancient and almost universal. From people whose abilities seemed so far beyond mere mortals, that they seemed like gods, to the victor in battle surrounded in his glory. As a metaphor of overcoming, the hero has a deep resonance.

* The fair maiden and the handsome prince have long been a staple of western fairy tales.

* Western ideals of fairness have been an extravagant buttress to racism of all kinds. Gentlemen prefer blondes. Blonde-haired blue eyed children get adopted more easily. Blonde Barby dolls outsell black and red-haired Barbys 10 to 1. Blondes get more attention and more harassment. ‘Bimbos’ must be blond. If the product is up-market, use a brunette in your adverts. The power of the myth is incredible considering its obvious banality.

* Myths of an ideal body. Crude old survival advantages of size are generalised and then misapplied to peoples’ appearance. e.g. Penis and breast size irrationally equated with virility and fecundity.

* These ideals of beauty conflict with the reality of our wonderful physical range and diversity. Differences can seem significant divisions when in reality, beneath the conditioning that makes us appear so ‘different’, human beings are 99% similar. There is an old fear of deviance and difference. Only complete normality is safe. As only few people can approximate to ‘complete normal’ the fear is active in everyone. Glamour is the idealisation of normality. 

* One of the roots of the word is in the glamour or look that could induce a trance - entranced. It represented the power of women. The reality of all female power is now hidden behind a smoke screen of glamour girl mythology.

* Myths of invulnerabilty and protection from death. Ancient myths generated from an awe and fear of death. Myths of heaven (perfection reached and experienced) and immortality.

* WWII was a world-wide war in which the carnage of civilians was a major aspect of the strategy. Over 45 million people died of which two thirds were civilians. The democratisation of war, that started with the armies of Napoleon, brought to a nadir. Nothing on this global scale of indiscriminate violence had happened before. This blanket legacy of terror may have paved the way for a global imposition of glamour. It is now understood how the experience of brutality leads to low self-esteem. Glamour breeds on the demoralised and displaced.

* Glamour is a gigantic confidence trick in which we are maneuvered into psychic self-mutilation. 

* Glamorising the role of men as warriors (Rocky is a top selling video in many parts of the world) prepares men for their continuing wholesale self-destruction in warfare. The machismo of armed struggle makes it difficult to think of all the effective non-violent possibilities before resorting to such desperate measures. 

Page spread from Class Myths & Culture 1990

* And yet although it appears to oppose death, Glamour is close to death because it is a mask. A shimmering picture of reality behind which is n o t h i n g. Living a glamorous life is a facade covering the most empty of existences.

* Because glamour mythically opposes death and decay its ideal model of perfection is youth. The features of youth dictate many of the facets of glamour’s criteria. Small snub noses, fair hair, smooth featureless skin, innocence. Picturing youth as a target of sexual lust inevitably encourages the sexual abuse of children.

* The glamorous are ‘playboys’ and girls. They don’t work, they just have exciting lives. As a little boy I understood the glamour girls would give me a good time (in contrast to the ordinary women in my life who as adults gave me a hard time).

* The recognition of parenting as actual productive labour is entirely contrary to capitalism, and the isolation of re productivity essential for its survival.

* The US is obsessed with childhood. Batman as a big adult hit film. It is self-conscious about its own youthful dominance as a nation. Glamour is the screen behind which Americans feel awful.

* Hollywood invented glamour. There is an oft-quoted myth that anyone can make it in California, the land of opportunity. This may have been the case for some heavily armed Whites in the pioneer days... but the reality now is of a massive class for whom there is no opportunity.

* Glamour is the myth creation of the American owning class. It is the screen they hide behind. It does not represent the actual US owning class people who are as ordinary as any oppressors but is a mythical social ideal of superiority that is accessible, by good fortune to any family. 

* American TV exports account for at least 75 per cent of all TV programming in distribution around the world. In some third world countries more than 80% of the broadcasting day is given over to US reruns and US multi-national advertising.

* Whilst the US inundates the rest of the world With its own dumped TV exports, it imports virtually nothing...

* We strive for the glamorous ideals but there is nothing to be achieved. Glamour is Illusion. The only satisfaction to be gained from ‘being glamorous’ is that we are then NOT UGLY, not worthless. It is a sort of protection from feeling the accumulated shit of oppression which says that we are ugly and worthless unless we are rich, famous and attractive.

* Glamour gives the impression that beauty is not of the moment but fixed and consistent. To be a good glamour model you have to have all round looks that don’t fade or vary according to conditions. All of us are attractive when we are alive and animated. In spite of glamour we recognise this.

* The rules of this perfection are so rigid that no one can ever fulfil them. We are always ‘not good enough.’

* Glamorous images include many human characteristics that are inherently attractive, e.g. being vivacious or even simply alert are not culturally constructed features of human attractiveness. This conflation of irrational myth and more global human to human attraction makes it confusing. Glamour really does seem desirable.

* These values are very deeply held. It feels so natural to be attracted to a glamorous person. Of course being glamorous can give a person confidence in themselves (for instance) and someone confident is truly attractive beyond cultural norms. Can we imagine changing our ideas of beauty so they are not exclusive? Even the word exclusive has an alluring connotation. To me it feels very deeply natural but thinking about it tells me it must be cultural and so a choice.

* No particular body type or human feature is intrinsically more attractive than any other. Such judgments are historically formed. Are artificial. Are culture specific. We tend to think of ‘our’ standards of beauty as absolute and universal but in parts of West Africa, for instance, a high forehead and rolls of fat on the back of the neck signify those most attractive and beautiful.

* The fact these beliefs and values are so deeply held suggest that they are forced on us very early in our lives. And that concepts of desirable appearances are linked to the powerful motor of our developing identity & sexual values. For a very young person who is just becoming aware of hir SELF the information that we are not able to feel good about our identity/self unless we have a particular appearance is a major trauma which it is difficult for most of us to imagine as adults. If it had been simply information we would now, given the arguments such as listed above, be able to change our minds. However to me the values feel ‘fixed’ and unchangeable. Thoughts and values only become rigid when they are forced on us in a way that hurts or frightens us. And this hurt does not then have the chance for emotional healing. We never get rational information to contradict the glamour myth. Glamour must be part of the damage caused to all of us by oppression. The earliness of this hurt gives us the impression that our judgement of beauty is something deeply innate rather than culturally constructed.

* Apart from the original hurt of this perverted picture of beauty in the world, such pressure on people to have a particular type of body actually does build-up and kill many people. Anorexics have lives dominated by physical appearance. Nearly all women are heavily pressured by issues of bodyweight and shape. 

* Everybody ‘knows’ that it is part of the oppression of women especially; slimming clubs, schemes and foods are highly popular. Again rational ‘health’ reasons for wanting to lose weight can screen the oppressive functions. Instead we need re-learning-to-love-ourselves-as-we-are-clubs.

* Once the oppression is set-up and internalised market forces create the demand to keep it in operation. A campaign for real people on the media was up against this. The picturing and participation of people with disabilities and physical differences in art and the media is a crucial part of our liberation from the yoke of glamour. It was being pushed through on a platform of equal opportunities. This is at present easier than trying to oppose glamour head on. 

* Glamour leaves out the reality of ourselves as living organisms. As appearances we can take on a different sort of static existence.

* Body functions are taboo in the media... including birth and death (apart from violent death used as a symbol, the whole complex and profound process of death, dying and bereavement is rarely pictured) Such exclusions bolster the otherwise tenuous norm of glamour. [ed. this is something that has changed in the 25 years since this was written]

* A friend said “If only we could make socialism glamorous”. This is typical of the confused thinking around glamour which stymies human development.

Oil painting by Stefan Szczelkun

* Camp glamour and Vogueing made glamour inclusive and available for manipulation, deconstruction, having a laugh at. Generally camp culture has done some of the most liberating spoofs on glamour. Camp refuses to accept any natural basis for glamour. It is all reduced to an applied choice of bad taste. It converts glamour to Bad Taste from which position it is possible to reject its power.

* Glamour ruins the relationships of people who aspire to its standards by putting impossible demands on their expectations of themselves and each other. Especially as they begin to age.

* People who have accepted that they are not glamorous tend to be banned from the arena of first class life. They are never in the limelight.

* Only a human sense of humour about all this saves us from disastrous disconnection from reality. Fortunately glamour is potentially pretty funny because it is so absurdly tragic.

* Glamorous people don’t show or discharge fear (Except in highly dramatised situations). In fact they have the minimum of any emotional expression that might spoil their appearance.

* Because to be REALLY glamorous is to be The Complete Victim. The archetypes of glamour in their real lives will often become super victims. Marilyn Monroe and James Dean.

*Key requirements you need to fulfil to be a really glamorous person (rather than just look like one) is to be able to have natural facial expression, tone of voice and posture. Its important that glamour looks like the most natural thing in the world rather than the most fake.

* If your appearance approximates to a glamorous ideal you have the offer of advantage. It is difficult to ignore this offer. But if taken up it severely limits life activity such as care of young children. Nappies, grizzling babies, rough and tumbles, pillow-fights are not glamorous activities. Children never have media space being themselves. The glamour puss is not a mother. 

* Glamour posits a life that is not tactile. Sex becomes a primarily visual activity. We come into physical contact only to provide ourselves with an exciting visual phantasy.

* The important everyday activities, relationships and struggle with our own situations past and present, are devalued by glamour as unheroic; not places for courage and dramatic music. In fact most of our struggles for liberation and most of the important relations in our lives happen in this sort of unglamorous space.

* Glamour is welded to consumerism and entertainment. Further discussion would require analysis of the alienated relations assumed by these concepts.

* People look more attractive on video. A dull gift looks better wrapped in cellophane. The body builders oil themselves and never touch each other. We describe one person as dull another as sparkling.

* Real life is pock-marked and frail, and deeply satisfying. The media image of life is sanitised and glossy, and disappointing.

* The important thing in glamour is in defining power as NOT FOR EVERYONE but at the same time classless and arising from the masses by genetic fortune. The hierarchies formed invade all human relations diverting our attention from our own real power.

* Oppression that is based on self-exploitation and internalised negative images of ourselves is extremely unstable. And in real terms it is easy to liberate ourselves from it if we act in unison. The chains are in our hearts and we can throw off these chains and be liberated from the two dimensional existence imposed by glamour.

Stefan Szczelkun 1990  (slightly amended from printed version 2014)

http://stefan-szczelkun.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/52-glamour-cards.html